Thomas and Meg McQuillan in the kitchen of their Riverside home with a platter of what McQuillan has coined “SparCs” — what used to be the 150,000 pounds of edible but unattractive food Baldor Specialty Foods was discarding each week before he created the program resulting in zero waste. less

Thomas and Meg McQuillan in the kitchen of their Riverside home with a platter of what McQuillan has coined “SparCs” — what used to be the 150,000 pounds of edible but unattractive food Baldor Specialty ... more

Photo: Jennifer Turiano / Hearst Media

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A platter of SparCs — the shredded skin of carrots, ends of celery stalks and the tops and bottoms of tomatoes. Thomas McQuillan of Baldor Specialty Foods has started a program to sell these vegetables and fruits for poultry feed, feed for pigs and other animals, and to chefs. McQuillan initiated a zero-waste plan, and at his home he uses the vegetables to make tomato sauce, carrot cake, salads, and broth for soup. less

A platter of SparCs — the shredded skin of carrots, ends of celery stalks and the tops and bottoms of tomatoes. Thomas McQuillan of Baldor Specialty Foods has started a program to sell these vegetables and ... more

Photo: Jennifer Turiano / Hearst Media CT

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Greenwich couple use passion for sustainability to cut food waste

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GREENWICH — When Meg McQuillan was in her mid-20s, she decided to drop everything in New York City and attend university in Italy.

It was a scary choice, she said, leaving friends, family and a job at “Food and Wine Magazine” that encouraged her love for food, wine and travel and was paying for her master’s degree.

But she said she knew that it would be one of the last chances she had to take advantage of being single and free, despite her own fear and parents who thought she was crazy.

“It was the best year of my life,” she said. And she met her husband, Thomas McQuillan, the day she arrived, as he was packing up his things to head back home to New York.

“Thomas was there, and our first date was his last night there. He was just saying goodbye to people. He ... was like, ‘Do you want to go out for dinner?’ And it was cold, the end of December, and we were strolling around the whole city ... And I remember thinking that was so nice, but I’ll never see him again.”

Last week, almost 20 years later, the McQuillans sat in their blue and beige living room in Riverside talking about the rampant American trend of wasting food and how they have become pioneers in sustainability.

In a sense, the Greenwich family has become an example in the sustainability movement of doing it right.

Their interest in food reclamation dates back years, but it got a boost at the launch last March of ReFED, a non-profit dedicated to reducing U.S. food waste. Thomas McQuillan, 50, Director of Food Service Sales and Sustainability for the Bronx-based Baldor Specialty Foods, was invited to speak about his plans to reduce waste at the company.

”We realized he was incredibly knowledgeable and passionate and very resourceful in the area of food waste sustainability,” said Jesse Fink of the Fink Family Foundation and a member of the ReFED steering committee.

At the launch, McQuillan, on a whim, said that Baldor, a food distribution company that provides produce and other eatables to restaurants, hotels and schools around the Northeast, would reduce its food waste to zero by the end of 2016 — without consulting his employers first, he admitted.

And he did it, turning the business into a zero-organics-to-landfill company in less than a year and catching attention in the sustainability and food distribution worlds.

”Other companies were saying their goal was to get to 50 percent waste by 2030,” Meg McQuillan said Wednesday evening. ”And here he was saying zero waste by the end of the year.”

McQuillan took the 150,000 pounds of food scraps discarded weekly from the company and turned them into what he calls “Sparcs” — scraps spelled backwards. He sells the fresh produce bits and pieces to restaurants and farms and donates the remainder to be mixed in with poultry feed. By November 2016, he had achieved his personal goal of ensuring leftover food from the business went to people and animals instead of to landfills.

With the sustainability mindset Thomas McQuillan claims he was born with, he went full-throttle and brought his practices into his home.

“He brought like eight bins of tomatoes home when he first started at Baldor, and we made tomato sauce out of it. We put them in the jars and it lasted like a year,” his 14-year-old daughter, Genna, said. Both she and her brother, Luke, 12, have caught the recycle habit.

Sustainability, Thomas McQuillan said, “as individuals not even for companies, is really an opportunity to look at every asset under our control and do something with those assets to glean the greatest value.

”That means the clothes on your back and the food we will make for dinner tonight,” he said. “How can you glean the most from it until there is nothing left?”

McQuillan keeps a compost bowl in the kitchen. Both kids know where to empty the bowl in their organically-maintained lawn.

”We usually just take the banana peels,” said Luke, “or the core of an apple, and then we put it into this part of the yard. And it’s good for some birds, and then we have fresh soil.”

“Think about years ago,” said Meg McQuillan, 45. “We didn’t even have different containers for garbage and recyclables. I remember as an older kid being like, “what?” And now they build kitchens with the two bins built in under the sink. It’s an education, and change of mindset and awareness.”